At some point, Ben Escoto authored the tool rdiff-backup , an incremental backup tool which uses an rsync-like algorithm to create filesystem backups. Rdiff-backup also saves metadata such as permissions, owner and group IDs, ACLs, etc. Rdiff-backup stores past versions as well and allows easy rollback to a point in time. It even compresses backups. However, rdiff-backup has one drawback: you have to install it on the remote server as well. This makes it impossible to use rdiff-backup to backup to storage services that don’t allow running arbitrary software.